How to Leverage Third-Party Platforms Alongside Thinkific Communities

Learn how to effectively use both third-party platforms and Thinkific Communities to engage your audience, monetize your content, and build a sustainable business.

About This Guide

As a Creator Educator, you may have already built a following on a third-party platform like Facebook, and it can be daunting to think about transferring that community over to Thinkific Communities—where to start, how to communicate with your audience, the fear of losing your following—these are all valid questions and insecurities. But really, you don't have to choose between one or the other—you can leverage both platforms to not only deliver an amazing experience for your audience but also to create a funnel for your members and monetize your content! Whether you're a Creator Educator looking to migrate fully to Thinkific Communities, or looking to leverage multiple platforms, this guide will provide valuable insights and information to help you succeed.

Creating Value for Your Members

Third-party platforms can be a powerful way to generate leads and build an audience, but can also be limited in terms of creating an effective learning environment. Some platforms contain ads and algorithms that are distracting, and raise privacy concerns, particularly if the learning content or subjects are quite personal.

But the reality is that your audience might be used to engaging on these platforms, and have formed habits around using them. So if you choose to leverage both, it's important to communicate to them that you're not asking them to leave that platform, but rather set a clear path and purpose for both platforms, so that the learning goals and experience that you deliver through your Thinkific Community become that much more unique and powerful.

Leveraging Both Platforms

Learn how Sara Hammond, therapist, and creator of How Humans Heal, used Thinkific Communities to scale her business: Check out her Thinkific Community success story!

By differentiating the distinct positioning and purpose of both platforms, you create more value for your business and your members, while establishing a clear funnel to start monetizing your skills, knowledge, and content. So while third-party platforms like Facebook can be a great way to generate leads and build an audience, this allows you to position your Thinkific Community as a focused destination for learning and education—all within your control, and under your own brand. This will ensure that your members understand the value of your Thinkific Community, take it seriously, and are more likely to engage with it.

For example, you could use your Facebook Page to answer FAQs, share polls, and ask questions of your audience, all while generating leads and driving this traffic to your Thinkific Community, where you can then dive into sharing and selling your courses and other learning products. You can even sell memberships to your Thinkific Community, making it a high-quality, exclusive learning community for like-minded learners, giving you a source of reliable, recurring income.

Benefits of Thinkific Communities

Your Thinkific Community is a learning community, which is not the same thing as a social network. It is a destination for learning and education and a safe, familiar, and collaborative space for your members to come together and learn—all within your control, and under your own brand.

Value for You as a Creator:

Total control over your community, brand, audience, and content
Focused content and conversations around learning and education
Creates funnels to monetize and sell your courses and other learning products
A direct source of feedback, insights, and ideation to inform your next course
A source of recurring, predictable income through memberships

Value for Your Members:

Fewer distractions
No targeted advertisements or algorithms
Exclusive access to learning content and a community of like-minded peers and experts
A safe, familiar learning experience consistent with your brand and/or course material

Getting Started with Thinkific Communities

Learn how to build a thriving community that helps grow your business with our free on-demand course!

Set Up Your Community

Check out our Thinkific pricing comparison page to determine what plan and number of Communities best suit your business needs
Create a Community on your Thinkific account
Determine who can access your exclusive content by adjusting your community access
Customize your Community Landing Page to showcase your Community and prompt your existing audience and future leads to sign up
Publish your Community

Migrate Your Members

You won't be able to migrate existing posts and conversations, subscriptions, and payment methods from your third-party platform. If you want to migrate student payment methods into Thinkific, you can use coupons to encourage them to sign up on your Thinkific site and enter their payment information.

If your members still need to be added to Thinkific, you will need to create their accounts before you are able to enroll them in your Thinkific Community. Different options will be available to you, depending on your plan.

You can manually create each learner account.
Create a discount coupon code and offer this to your members so they create an account manually and enroll in your community at a discount or free of charge.
You can import members in bulk from file.

Enroll Your Members

If your members are already on Thinkific, you can manually enroll each member. This must be done one member at a time, so we only recommend this if you have a small number of members in your community. Additional enrollment options will depend on your community access settings.